Beijing on Wednesday conducted its first ever car license plate lottery, designed to restrict vehicle purchases and curtail worsening traffic jams. The lottery meeting was attended by representatives of the applicants, statistics experts and transport officials to ensure the openness, fairness and equity.A total of 17,600 applicants – from a total of 210,178 – were awarded plates at the lottery, the first since the Beijing municipal government put in place the scheme at the end of last year. The new mechanism seeks to reduce new car registrations by allowing only 240,000 this year, about a third of the number registered in 2010. Data shows the number of cars in Beijing more than quadrupled from 1 million in 1997 to 4.76 million in 2010. Last year, Beijing saw an annual record of 800,000 new cars take to the already overcrowded streets.